You've mentioned an idea due to Knuth. I would be grateful if you could send a reference to it.
I came across it in one of the papers in Knuth's book Literate Programming (can't be more precise from memory). I'm off to a conference but will look it up and send you a more exact reference at start of next week. John Atwood's reference to the MAG system lead me to its interesting homepage, which I hadn't known about before. I'll have to take a look at that when I get back. What I consider the key issue for such a system is to be incremental, i.e., the work required upon changing a small part of the basic program should be proportional to the size of that change and not to the complexity of the entire program. ___cheers,_dave________________________________________________________ www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~tweed/pi.htm |tweed's law: however many computers email: tweed@cs.bris.ac.uk | you have, half your time is spent work tel: (0117) 954-5250 | waiting for compilations to finish.